


The Doctor and the Priestess of Pythia

by fannishliss



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-06
Updated: 2011-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-26 16:04:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A runaway Prydonian, formerly affiliated with the House of Lungbarrow, steals a type 40 Tardis and flees illegally into Gallifreyan backtime.  As is the danger with backtime, he becomes embroiled in a snare of destiny, paradox, and things he can’t quite remember.  Here is the story of that great Hero and the inauspicious interview with a Pythian Seer that changes his fate forever by giving him a mission and a reason to live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Doctor and the Priestess of Pythia

**title: The Doctor and the Priestess of Pythia**  
author: [](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/)**fannishliss**    
pairing: The Doctor/Rose  
rating: PG  
warnings: none  
spoilers: quotation from “The Parting of the Ways”  
length:   2200 words  
disclaimer: This beloved character is the property of the BBC. I’m just having great time playing!

Summary: A runaway Prydonian, formerly affiliated with the House of Lungbarrow, steals a type 40 Tardis and flees illegally into Gallifreyan backtime. As is the danger with backtime, he becomes embroiled in a snare of destiny, paradox, and things he can’t quite remember. Here is the story of that great Hero and the inauspicious interview with a Pythian Seer that changes his fate forever by giving him a mission and a reason to live.

Author’s Notes: I have not read _Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible_ , by Marc Platt. Yet. :P This story features the Doctor in his first incarnation, before regeneration, but already exhibiting many of his nascent personality characteristics. I hope you’ll like him! Like River says, he's so very young. :P

~*?*~

**The Doctor and the Priestess of Pythia**

“How beautiful you are,” she breathed, her hand lightly caressing the side of his face in greeting.

“What?” he answered, surprised. After a lifetime of taunts from his cousins, he’d never expected anyone to say such a thing to him. He’d been long enough in Gallifrey’s backtime not to be overly shocked by the unlikely combination of Gallifreyans and sensuality -- he’d taken a wife after all -- but the priestess’s flattery put him off kilter, all the more so because she was touching his mind as she teased him. Of course, it was taboo to return a Pythian Sister’s mindtouch, as you would with any other Gallifreyan, so you never knew what they were really thinking. How convenient for them.

“Your lives, my dear. Noble, courageous, strong. But so sad,” she frowned. “Like a lonely god,” the priestess said vaguely, shuddering.

“I don’t believe in gods,” he said, frowning, but he didn’t step away from her touch. He had a wealth of flaws, but he didn’t like to be rude. Furthermore, he’d deliberately come here to experience Pythian prophecy firsthand, so he didn’t intend to back out.

“Of course you don’t,” she murmured. “I never said you did. You’re the fire at the heart of the sun, night and day, arbiter of life and death.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. His timesense prickled at her words, leaving him uncomfortable and annoyed -- but her rather vague imagery wasn’t precise enough to test the accuracy of her prophecy. “Your words are empty, and if I’m honest, rather threatening. Life and death -- are you accusing me of violence? A thief and a coward, perhaps, but --”

“Oh no, my dear, far from it! Why, you are the magus, the fool, the lover --” her eyes flashed at him, heavy lidded and seductive.

He blushed at her forwardness despite himself. He was beginning to understand Rassilon’s disdain for these women’s rule, their mystical obfuscations and spoutings of archetypal nonsense. Holding back the progress of the tribes of Gallifrey with the fetters of superstition, Rassilon would say.

“I know I am a fool, you don’t have to remind me.” His marks at the Academy had been abysmal, but he couldn’t be bothered with so much effort if it was meant to gain him nothing more than a lifetime or twelve behind a bureaucratic desk, a heavier robe and a ridiculous collar.

“Precious child,” the priestess said, caressing him again. He stood there, awkward, enduring the long gaps between her words. He had the strongest impression she was skimming through the events of his life as though flipping through the pages of a book.

“I wish I could help you,” she said sadly. He tried to dismiss her compassionate tone as another deplorable attempt at emotional manipulation -- but it seemed so real. “Yours is a terrible fate. But at least you won’t always be alone.”

“I’m not alone!” he objected. The House he’d run away from meant nothing to him. “I have a wife, a young daughter.”

“A dream,” she sighed, and a tear rolled down her face. “This short span will be nothing but a dream, lost as your heart splits in two.”

This Pythian was really quite an actor, an engaging charlatan, but she’d gone too far. “How could I forget my own child, born of flesh, from my wife’s own body?”

The hand she held pressed to the side of his face began to tremble. “Your child will be mother to the last ever born!” the Pythian cried. “Ah! How could we be so cruel!” The priestess jerked her hand away from his temple and pressed both palms against her eyes, breathing harshly.

He could feel his face twisting into a mask of scorn at her outburst. He already knew that he was amongst the last generations to conceive naturally. He’d been part of Gallifrey’s past long enough to find a compatible partner whom he greatly respected, and the birth of their perfect little daughter had been a miracle. Still, looming was no tragedy; it was one of the greatest of Rassilon’s accomplishments, advancing the genetic potential of the Gallifreyan race, increasing the number who bore the qualities necessary to become Time Lords.

His timesense continued to prickle uncomfortably, but still, nothing she’d said had particularly resonated against his timestream as fact.

The priestess tried to rein herself in. Her hands twitched, reluctantly, as she sought to bring her reactions under control -- or so she wished him to think.

“You are a disciple of Rassil Onasti,” she said.

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘disciple,’” he objected, “but I am a close associate, yes. Does that offend you?”

The priestess gazed at him with sober eyes, all traces of her former flirtation faded away. “It saddens me, more than you could know. The Prydonian is a hero, no doubt a great thinker. We have foreseen his so-called ‘Intuitive Revolution’ and its outcomes.”

“Unfavorable to yourselves, I’d suppose,” he smirked.

“Unfavorable to all Gallifreyans!” the priestess retorted loudly. “Why should we travel through time and space, meddling in ways we could never foresee? We’ve long been mistresses of the power to observe and consider from afar. But your Rassilon has set the wheel spinning. The death of our race is set in motion, unavoidable.” Her gaze pierced him. “You have a part in it, destroyer of worlds.”

He felt a horrible chill run down his spine, the timesense chill of certainty, as at last she pronounced this dire specific. He’d wanted prophecy, and that’s what he’d received.

“No,” he denied, pointlessly, his heart racing, sweat springing out cold all over his body.

At his denial, her hand rose up again, but did not touch him. The Pythian regarded him with pity.

“Yours is a terrible burden,” she said again. “Let me at least look into the timefolds to seek your salvation,” she asked.

“Why ... how... could a destroyer of worlds ever find salvation?” he asked hopelessly, the terrifying appellation sending shocks zinging up and down his spine even as he spoke it.

The priestess stilled her hand, shaking her head.

“My insights are dark this day. You are not hearing the whole truth. Despite the tragedy clinging to you, it’s plain that you are a Hero of Time. Light outweighs darkness in you many times over. You should forget my words,” she said. “Forget you ever came here, visiting me. Forget your foolish meddling into the forbidden past.”

“Forget?” he cried, angry, full of conflicting emotions. He had to acknowledge that he had broken Gallifrey’s strictest law by travelling into its past. Was this to be his punishment? “Forget, perhaps, my wife and daughter too?”

“Perhaps,” she whispered.

“Ahh!” he exhaled, but his grief and rage remained firmly lodged in his heart and lungs. He would have to tell Rassilon that he had visited the Sisterhood, that his timesense confirmed the truth of their predictions; he knew at last, without doubt, that this Seer was both genuine and sincere. The rest, he would need to forget. But even his wife, his pretty babe -- all, all lost?

“May I, please, look for your hope?” the priestess asked, another tear spilling from her eye. She had lovely, dark brown eyes, he noted.

Her cool hand cupped his cheek, and he felt the ripples of her searching, as though she had thrown a stone into a pond. She waited, patient, for the ripples to flow back to her.

It seemed to him that she searched for a long, long time.

At last she smiled thinly.

“Yes,” she said. “As I said, you are not only Magus, but Lover. You will meet your salvation when you need her most. A human child, compassionate and valiant.”

“How will I know her?” He knew as he spoke that in his heart he had already forsaken his wife. He grieved, for she had given him a home, a beloved child; apparently, he would leave her; he would not even remember her.

“She is a thing out of dreams, a fairy tale, a bad wolf,” the Pythian frowned, “but no, that is the golden cloak she has tailored out of time for her veiling.”

The priestess paused again, and in that weighty moment, he knew that her next pronouncement meant life and death to him. His report to Rassilon would make little difference; Rassilon’s opinion of the Pythians had already been determined. The effect of this visit on his own timestream was another matter. His timesense burned painfully in a way he’d never felt before. He prepared his mind to receive the Pythian’s words, and when she spoke, he felt and heard the resonations through centuries and lifetimes to come, the reverberations searing deep into the base of his brain, there to await their moment of fulfillment.

The Pythian Sister spoke, and the Time Lord heard her speak truth. “Her name is Rose.”

“Let me see her face,” he begged.

“Foolish Time Lord-- you of all of us should know how little her face matters,” said the Pythian, but her voice didn’t carry the harshness of her words.

“All right, all right-- maybe I am a fool, but please, give me a glimpse. I must recognize her when that day comes.”

The Pythian nodded, taking his hand and bringing it to her own temple. She would admit him only to an alcove of her mind, secure and protected.

She showed him a tiny planet, sparkling blue and white and green. “This is Earth. You will be its defender,” the priestess said.

As his timesense rang in accord with her words, he was humbled. Truly, Rassilon had mistaken the Pythian Order’s reserve for weakness. He now understood the extent of their powers.

“Earth is her home, and the home of so many of your hero companions. She is human-- beautiful, strong, merciful, devoted-- divine.”

“Divine?” he queried, unable to mask his skepticism.

“Observe, Time Lord,” the priestess commanded.

He heard his own voice, terrified, pleading. _You can't control life and death!_

A beautiful, ringing, beloved voice answered, with all the resonance of the Vortex behind it:

_But I can. I bring life... I want you safe, my Doctor, protected from the false God.  I can see the whole of time and space -- every single atom of your existence... How can I let go of this? I can see everything.  All that is... all that was... all that ever could be.  The sun and the moon... the day and night._

Brown eyes and a golden aura, and so much love and power that he was blinded by it, his talented and well-trained mind incapable of taking it in.

Gently, the Pythian removed him from the vision. Tears were streaming down his face.

“Sun and Moon, Day and Night -- life and destruction -- the two impulses of the great cosmic cycle. Do you understand now, Doctor?”

He looked up, his breathing stuttering back under his own control.

“What? What did you call me?” His timesense rang like the gong of a cloister at the name.

“Doctor -- she has called you by name, Prydonian exile. Will you answer to it?”

He straightened, and wiped his face. It wasn’t a proper name, merely a title, but it represented the core of his life’s work, his best understanding of his innermost gifts, untainted by the petty ambitions of his erstwhile House. “Yes. Yes, I will.”

“Go then, Doctor, with our blessing.” The priestess bowed slightly, her hands retreating within her robe.

“Until we all fall under your curse?” he said, eyebrows raised.

She looked at him with eyes that had seen across the universe. “You do not fall, Doctor. Only you, somehow, do not.” She lowered her gaze and turned away. The audience had ended.

He had gone to the Sisters of Pythia with something to prove: the ascendance of his own intellect over their doomed rituals. He had come away a burden and a gift: so much more vital than mere victory.

The Pythian had searched out his name: the Doctor. She’d showed him a planet and a people he would vow to defend, even through and beyond his forgetting.

He’d been an exile, with words like ugly, stupid, thief, coward, pounding grooved pathways through his mind, undermining his worth, degrading his potential. His feigned indifference, his pretended moral high ground, his cleverness, his anger, had all been replaced by the longing to be worthy of her, to live out his lives guided by the light of her countenance.

He would travel Time and Space, rooting out anything that might threaten her, no longer the scoff-law, renegade, aimless underachiever. Instead, he would be Time’s Champion, and the Earth would always be defended. He was the Doctor, for she was his Rose.

_~space and time, sun and moon, day and night~_

~*?*~


End file.
